This was the original shot I was trying to execute before “Pete” jumped in the way with his sign! (See previous post)

References to “Selling the Brooklyn Bridge” abound in American culture, sometimes as examples of rural gullibility but more often in connection with an idea that strains credulity. At the time the bridge was built, the aerodynamics of bridge building had not been worked out. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s—well after the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie) in 1940. (This was shown to us in University as a lesson of miscalculation, I just liked the way it was oscillatiing – perhaps this drove me to the Electrical Engineering side instead of Civil?)

It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished into history and been replaced.

This is also in spite of the substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh – by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables. Diagonal cables were installed from the towers to the deck, intended to stiffen the bridge. They turned out to be unnecessary, but were kept for their distinctive beauty. www.kerstenbeck.com

Like this:

This was shot inside St. John’s Cathedral in NYC. There are no rstrictions on Tripods here, other than to respect the Patrons who are praying. What is interesting about this shot is the camera White Balance (pls email us if you would like a short description on this White Balance thing). I had set it for Incandescent for the lights above the pews, and the result for the natural sunlight from the Rosarie is blue. This is a three shot High Dynamic Range (HDR) image.

The building as it appears today conforms primarily to a second design campaign from the prolific Gothic Revival architect Ralph Adams Cram of the Boston firm Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson. Without slavishly copying any one historical model, and without compromising its authentic stone-on-stone construction by using modern steel girders, Saint John the Divine is a refined exercise in the 13th century High Gothic style of northern France. The Cathedral is almost exactly two football fields in length (601 feet or 186 meters) and the nave ceiling reaches 124 feet (37.7 meters) high. It is the longest Gothic nave in the world, at 230 feet. Seven chapels radiating from the ambulatory behind the choir are each in a distinctive nationalistic style, some of them borrowing from outside the gothic vocabulary. Known as the “Chapels of the Tongues” (Ansgar, Boniface, Columba, Savior, Martin, Ambrose and James), their designs are meant to represent each of the seven most prominent ethnic groups to first immigrate to New York City upon the opening of Ellis Island in 1892 (the same year the Cathedral began construction).